Luxembourg-based modular data centre specialist Etix Everywhere this morning announced plans to open a €120 (approx. £108.7) million data centre campus outside Frankfurt – which is on track to outstrip London as Europe’s data centre powerhouse.
The first phase of the project will provide 15 MVA of colocation capacity, developed on a 7,800 square metre greenfield site in Offenbach. At full capacity, the 18,000 square metre building will host more than 3,000 racks, Etix said.
The Frankfurt area is Europe’s second largest data centre cluster after Greater London but is undergoing significant growth, with 11 data centre expansions planned this year, including those of Colt Telecom, Digital Realty, Equinix, Interxion and Maincube.
Etix Everywhere: Four Potential Customers…
The project is a joint venture between Etix Everywhere, EVO, an energy supply company for electricity, natural gas and heat, and Data Center Group (DCG), a data center design, planning and certification office.
Saying the JV is in advanced negotiations with four potential customers, Robert Stoffers, Head of Energy Services for EVO, said in a release. “Our combined expertise will allow us to deliver a high-quality infrastructure to meet the booming demand for IT capacity in Frankfurt due to the exponential growth of IoT, Big Data, Blockchain.”
The data center has been designed to host different types of customers, from large Cloud Service Providers to enterprise customers, the JV said.
“It was essential to come up with a scalable technical solution providing a maximum flexibility.” said Ralf Siefen, Managing Director of Data Center Group.
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EN 50600 Certification
The data center will be EN 50600 certified, a European standard developed in 2016 for data centers and will be a so-called “multi-tiering” facility offering different redundancy levels within the same building; i.e. customers will be able to choose their IT room based on the certifications they want to have.
(EN 50600 sets out requirements for the air conditioning, cabling, security systems, ventilation and broader construction, as well as defining criteria for the operation of data centers. It was created by CENELEC; the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation)
While many market observers expected the public cloud to eat data centres’ lunch, the shift away from an ownership model to a capacity-on-demand model has kept the sector in rude good health, with customers increasing operating under a co-location model whereby they pay a monthly or annual rental fee for the space and basic infrastructure-level support in carrier-neutral facilities.
